Microsoft's Search Engine Plans

prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""

Comments

Re:Search by date

[TitanBL]

The new iPhoto handles this very well - automatically imports the date the photo was taken. Then you can group the images together in albums similar to the way you create 'smart playlists' in iTunes.

Re:Hmmmm...

[tomstdenis]

you *can* do this to some limited sense with the command shell

for %a in (DSC*.JPG) do rename %a Wedding_%a

You just have to know a bit about the command shell...

Tom

EXIF headers in .jpg files contain the metadata

[Rick Richardson]

The metadata is there in the .jpg file itself...

$ cd ~/photos/100nikon
$ exifcomment dscn*.jpg | grep -y birthday
dscn0503.jpg 2001/06/02 14:40:33 Abby's 6th Bday: The birthday girl
dscn0713.jpg 2001/10/19 19:38:33 Dylan's 8th birthday
dscn0714.jpg 2001/10/19 19:38:47 Dylan's 8th birthday cake
dscn0715.jpg 2001/10/19 19:39:15 Dylan's 8th birthday - making a wish
dscn0718.jpg 2001/10/20 10:08:56 Dylan's 8th birthday - Lego construction
dscn0719.jpg 2001/10/20 10:09:20 Dylan's 8th birthday - Lego construction
[snip]

I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.

So what is Microsoft going to do? Fix this bug and call it a feature?

-Rick

That's the app you were using, not Windows

[blorg]

"I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed."

I use Windows (duck) and it preserves my metadata fine.

Re:MS need to (un)fix their Find program...

[Photon01]

This dosent need fixing .. it obviously didnt annoy you enough to make you look for the option to turn it off.

Hit Windows+F, click change preferences, click I want to search without an animated character.

Next click preferences again go to 'change files and folders search behaviour' then click advanced

Voilla, the find program is (un)fixed

Re:I have a suggestion for em..

[nolife]

Google can already do a good job of finding wedding photos.. They may not be yours but they are wedding photos ;)

Find images like this

[unoengborg]

In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)

You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.

So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.

Re:I'm not buying it

[edalytical]

I did a quick Google search and what I can tell iPhoto was introduced at MacWorld Expo January 7, 2002. Picasa was introduced in October 2002.